Mick Gatto in bizarre Footy Show interview over supplements scandal

In a sign the AFL year has not quite left the silly season, Melbourne underworld identity Mick Gatto appeared on The Footy Show on Thursday night to claim he’d been “embroiled” in the Essendon supplements saga.

In a convoluted interview with media figure and former Geelong great Sam Newman, Gatto claimed he had been approached by someone at Essendon to find out “what was going on” with the supplements saga.

He would not reveal who had approached him and provided scant details about the nature of the supposed request.

Gatto also said that throughout the saga he had been in contact with controversial biochemist Shane Charter.

“Now Shane came and saw me and he said ‘mate, I’ve been hard done by here’,” Gatto told Newman during the interview inside his Carlton restaurant, Villa Romano.

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“And he said ‘I can prove without any shadow of a doubt that the supplement they brought over here’, the Miso-4 (Thymosin beta-4) or whatever it was, ‘I can prove that it wasn’t that, it was something else’.

“He had compelling evidence that it was legal.

“We done a deal with some members of Essendon who tried to do a deal and he wanted to be paid for it because of his hardship and what he had been dragged through. They wouldn’t hand over, so they went and paid lawyers millions of dollars instead.”